On 'Kazanistan'

Abstract

Rawls's introduction and treatment of the fictional "Kazanistan" in his The Law of Peoples has not been well-understood. In this essay I situate "Kazanistan" relative to two aspects of the larger architectonic context of Rawls's work. The first concerns the reasonable pluralism that undermines the Rousseauvian congruence argument for stability of the right sort that Rawls advanced in Theory and that Rawls addresses in his revised stability argument in Political Liberalism. The second concerns the general jurisprudential orientation of Rawls's work from the 1950s forward, an orientation informed by Hart, Fuller, Finnis and eventually Soper. Situating Rawls's discussion of "Kazanistan" relative to these two aspects of the larger architectonic of his work shows that a great deal of the scholarly discussion of "Kazanistan" is neither illuminating nor on-point.